Ecosystems Knowledge

4Graphical Specifications for Modeling Existences

This new approach leads to thinking of each visual culture as an ecosystem composed of a multitude of imaging systems¹.

Bernard Darras

But because the similitudes that form the graphics of the world are one “cog” out of alignment with those that form its discourse, knowledge and the infinite labor it involves find here the space that is proper to them: it is their task to weave their way across this distance, pursuing an endless zigzag course from resemblance to what resembles it.

Michel Foucault²

In Chapter 3, we presented the principles for modeling knowledge ecosystems. In this chapter, we would like to emphasize the representation of these models by showing that they must be designed as diagrams. More precisely, the models that we design are the visual representations of an existence produced in order to understand this said existence and to potentially deduce new properties from it. The objective of modeling is to represent in a simple way the processes of signification by placing human interpretation, at the heart of the representation, into a composition involving knowledge-existences in an interactive information design.

After state-of-the-art graphical modeling systems, the aim of this chapter is to specify the diagrammatic rules that will be applied to graphically model informational existences and their relations in a knowledge ecosystem.

4.1. Principles of graphical modeling

In order to better understand the ...